Prime Video

A family struggles for survival in the face of a cataclysmic natural disaster.

You’re probably thinking that a disaster movie about a meteor on course to wipe out most of the population is not really what we need right now – it already feels like 2021 is just the sort of bad luck year where this is exactly what might happen in real-life. Throw into the mix a lead performance by action man Gerard Butler and you probably have a good idea of what to expect – get ready for Butler to punch the rock out of orbit! And you’d be wrong.

Against all odds, this is Butler’s best film in years (faint praise, admittedly), his performance that of a fallible man desperately trying his best to keep his family together in the worst of situations. Butler is John Garrity, a structural engineer, whose family has priority to get evacuated to an underground bunker in Greenland. He bundles his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin – Deadpool) and young son into the car, but an accident at the airport leads to a series of separations.

Director Ric Roman Waugh directed Butler in the previous year’s Angel Has Fallen, but this is a less gung-ho movie, boasting some decent fireball and shockwave effects and revealing just how far people will go to survive – at times it’s reminiscent of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. That’s not to say the movie avoids cliché and people doing some pretty dumb things, but the two-hour run time flies by.

Verdict: Much better than you imagine – it’s quality ‘end of world’ fare to fill a couple of hours over the weekend. 7/10

Nick Joy